Category: Digital Age Projects

We hope you’ve enjoyed the production of “The Calculus Tweetwars” and thanks to all that participated by interacting with the characters. The Calculus Tweetwars: Act 3 from Maria Andersen Also, check out our mention in the Chronicle of Higher Education Newton and Leibniz Duke it out on Twitter Possibly Related Posts: Group Exploration in Math Learning at Scale Slides from ICTCM Clickety Click Click: Awful Measures for Learning The Importance of Findability for Learners Why Random Practice is...

I wanted to wait until I was SURE that this was going to happen before I mentioned it here. My Honors Calculus II students have decided to “tweet” The Calculus Wars for modern times. Their assignment was to read “The Calculus Wars” by Jason Socrates Bardi, and then come up with a project (individually or collectively) that requires them to further explore something from the book. A few years ago, I had one student in this course and he build the Leibniz Calculating Machine the animation software Blender (you can see it here). Anyways, this year, there are three students. During our discussion of the book, we observed that the scientists involved were like the bloggers and tweeters of their time, sending and publishing an incredible amount of correspondence (some anonymous) via really old-fashioned mail (i.e. SLOW). Then we wandered into what it would look like if the Calculus Wars happened today and all the characters were in Facebook (friending, unfriending, fan pages, wall posting, etc.). Ultimately, the students decided to work together to create a modern-day recreation of The Calculus Wars. Facebook turned out to be too difficult (each follower would have to “friend” each character in order to see the storyline play out). The students have written a rather lengthy script that includes a rather large cast of characters. In order to get the twitter accounts, they...

Today I was the keynote speaker for Tech Tools 2010 in Scottsdale AZ, which was really fun! I survived the twitter backchannel (I “called out” the tweeters, according to @soul4real). This seemed to work really well and I’ll write more about what I did later. I also got “best dressed presenter ever” for wearing my magic doc martens with silver swirls. Here are the links to today’s presentations and resources. GE Plug into the Smart Grid (Augmented Reality) Teaching & Learning in the Digital Age Mindmap Careers in the Future Have PRIDE in what you TEACH. (What did you learn this month?) Interdisciplinary Studies Organize Your Digital Self (Slides or Mindmap) For future reference, you can find all of my mindmaps, slide decks, and past recorded webinars under Resources in the menu bar on the top of this blog. Several of you asked this afternoon about the magnifying program I used to magnify web URLs. It’s called Virtual Magnifying Glass (free, PC, Mac, or Linux). If you teach anything from the Internet to a room full of people, you should consider using it! I was also surprised to discover that many participants who are Second Life regulars had not read Neal Stephenson’s book Snow Crash. Stephenson basically describes “Second Life” (called the metaverse) in Snow Crash, written in 1992. So if you want to speculate about what Second Life...